She wished he could understand. “Because I am actually a lady.”
He drew in a breath to reply, then stopped.
He bit his lower lip, a shocking and surprising action.
It did the strangest things to her, his teeth on his sensual bottom lip.
“A fair point,” he admitted. “I cannot argue it.”
She allowed herself to smile up at him, though she was half certain she should frown at him for the rest of their acquaintance in retaliation for his honey nonsense. “I think it’d be very foolish of you to try.”
“What are we to do, then?” he asked softly.
A breeze traveled through the crush of the ballroom from the open windows and sent the briefest hints of lemon and juniper over her. His scent.
She drank it in and dared herself to say, “You ought to take up my cause, and then all will be well.”
His head lowered ever so slightly. “Are you blackmailing me?” And then he smiled, a beautiful, teasing, devastating sort of smile. “Are you going to make every family dinner a complete catastrophe until I agree?”
She cocked her head to the side. “Possibly.”
That smile of his turned to something knowing, something hot as he gazed down at her. Mystified, it seemed, by her very presence, a sort of need filled his gaze.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, her own heart beginning to hammer.
“Because I’m trying to decide how to make peace between us and stop our war of words.”
“It shall never cease.”
“Why?” he blurted.
“Because you are a man.” It was a simple sentence, and she knew it couldn’t convey her reasoning truly. But as a man he could never understand all that he had. And all that she did not.
“Thank God.” He laughed.
Those two words pounded through her, and all the heat and goodwill she’d felt vanished in an instant. “Exactly,” she all but growled.
“I beg your pardon?”
It was tempting to yank her hands from his and hie off. But she couldn’t do that to Margaret. And this fellow! He mightn’t look like a toad, but he was no prince. “The fact that you thank God you’re a man only proves my case.”
“Lady Beatrice,” he drawled with an infuriating dose of condescension. “You shall drive me mad.”
“One can only hope,” she gritted.
The music came to a stop, and she tugged her hands from his.
Instantly she felt the loss but shook the ridiculous sensation away.
“We have come back to the beginning of our argument, Your Grace, and since I am not one for torture, I shall take my leave.”
And she did.
Chapter Four
A good ice bath normally set Will to rights when the dark hours of night sunk his spirits. And, much to his dismay, his spirits had, as they so often did, slipped into the murky depths of sorrow. Sometimes, there was no explaining it. The intense melancholy could hit him right after a night of revels.
And the power of it could feel like a full gale. The episodes had begun after his mother’s departure, and he’d realized that he had his cocoon of safety and love brutally ripped away in one night. He had not realized how she had shielded her sons from the rather austere and cruel world of power…of men.